NEXT L.A.: A look at issues, people and ideas helping to shape the emerging metropolis. : A Small World After All : UCLA engineers are creating a world of micromachines: bug-like robots, Dick Tracy watches, sensors for pilot helmets, surgical tools and more.

A group of engineering professors at UCLA are building the future, but you’ll strain to see it.

Kris Pister assembles dust-size hinges, gears and motors into bug-like robots. Bill Kaiser has combined a computer processor and a radio transmitter on a single silicon chip, making the Dick Tracy wristwatch a real possibility.

Ching Ming Ho envisions thousands of tiny microflaps on airplane wings, subtly adjusting their positions thousands of times a second to cut drag and steer aircraft more sharply. This is the world of micromachines, the next step in miniaturization. The advantages over current technology: smaller, faster, cheaper.

“It’s a no-brainer,” said Pister, an electrical engineering professor.

Micromachines promise amazing new gadgets but also unprecedented dangers to personal liberty. An army of tiny mechanical bugs could quickly sift through rubble in search of survivors of an earthquake, for instance. But they would also make excellent spies.

When Frank Wazzan, dean of UCLA’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, recruited his first faculty member in this new field five years ago, “people did think I was off the wall,” he says.

But Wazzan stuck to his vision. Micromachinery, he believed, would lead to advances such as pilot helmets stuffed with sophisticated sensors, or less invasive medical operations using smaller tools.

With UCLA’s medical school and the Southern California’s aerospace industry, “we really have the best of both worlds to make this area grow,” Wazzan said. “It was a logical step to extrapolate.”

Today, the micromachinery effort at UCLA has grown to half a dozen professors and rivals the best in the country. Besides their Lilliputian size, what distinguishes micromachines is what they’re made of: silicon, the same stuff as computer chips.

Adapting technologies originally created for chip-making, micromachinists create their tiny wonders by building up layers of silicon and light-sensitive film and carving them into useful shapes.

So far the results are an impressive toy chest of gears, hinges and motors. Pister demonstrates his hinge-making process with a pop-up cut-out of UCLA’s Royce Hall. For perspective one of his graduate students placed a dead ant next to it, creating a Hollywood-esque monster scene under the microscope.

More practically, Pister has used his hinges to fold silicon into hollow but rugged triangular beams, similar in structure to the legs of crabs and lobsters. The beams are hinged to a central silicon wafer.

“That ends up looking very much like your shoulder,” he said. Put six legs together, and you have an insect. Add a solar panel to the body for power. Tiny levers and pulleys will run through the hollow beams to give the bug the muscles to move.

“We’ve got all the pieces of the puzzle sitting there,” Pister said. “It will be able to pick itself up and walk away.”

According to Pister, rescue workers at disasters such as the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City could dump a bucketful of these artificial insects into the mound of debris. Their built-in instructions could be as simple as “if you hear something or detect a warm body, start chirping.” The cricket-like sounds would tell rescuers where to dig.

Bugs could also wander around nuclear power plants or chemical dump sites, programmed to set off warnings when they detect contamination.

More sophisticated applications, however, require two-way radio communication. That’s where Kaiser, an electrical engineering professor, comes in. The process of making a mini-transmitter is somewhat different than making a computer processor, and melding the two is not trivial.

The process Kaiser developed essentially makes two chips and glues them together like an Oreo cookie. With this advance, cellular phones the size of cigarette packs could soon be the size of sugar cubes. From there, it’s a small jump to the inside of a watch--assuming there will someday be batteries both powerful and small enough.

In some uses batteries may not even be needed. Hundreds of sensors could be glued to bridges to keep track of wear and tear. In the aftermath of an earthquake, for instance, inspectors could send out radio waves that the sensors would absorb and transform into energy. The sensors would make their measurements, send out their findings and go back to sleep.

Such chips could also make the “smart” home a reality. Security sensors could detect movement of intruders. Environment sensors could set the temperature and humidity for every room. And when on vacation, you could easily check whether you left the stove on without making a return trip.

“I think a lot of people would feel a lot more secure,” Kaiser said. “It basically brings the technology down to where it’s affordable to everyone.”

Sew a sensor in a child’s clothing and you could always know where the child is. The flip side: Plant a sensor on an unsuspecting person and you’ll know where that person is, too.

Cheap, ubiquitous sensors would be able to collect unprecedented amounts of information about anyone and anything. “Personal privacy is at serious risk,” Pister said.

Other possible applications:

* Medicine: Despite all the advances and lasers, “there is no substitute for a scalpel and a suture,” Pister said. “What we’d like to do is place a miniature copy of the surgeon’s hand inside the patient’s body.”

* Manufacturing: Pister imagines “microrobot sweatshops” that will assemble electronic components, such as the insides of VCRs. Such work is currently done by hand.

* The military: With a network of 100,000 sensors dispersed somewhere like Bosnia, “nothing could move very far without being detected,” Kaiser said.

* Aerodynamics: Ho of the mechanical, aerospace and nuclear engineering department has demonstrated his idea--steering an aircraft using thousands of pinhead-sized flaps--on a French Mirage fighter jet. “It works,” he said.

Imperceptible changes in wing shape can drastically reduce the lifting force. Thus, changing one wing causes the plane to tilt and turn. The next step is to couple each flap to a sensor so it can instantly react to sudden changes in the winds. The hope is to be able to cut down the friction of turbulence--and thus fuel consumption--and improve maneuverability. The problem is by no means solved. Aerodynamics is notoriously fickle. “Very much like trying to kill a vampire,” Ho said. “If you don’t do it right, the drag gets stronger.”

Likewise, what will come to pass in the world of micromachines is still hard to see, and not just because they’re small.

“I don’t know where it’s going,” Pister said, “but it’s going somewhere important.”